Dealing With Illegal Immigration - A Federal Mandate, Not an Option
In 2005, I wrote an op-ed essay for the "Seattle Times" publication, "Times of Snohomish County," entitled "Under the Noses of Out-of-Work Americans," concerning illegal immigration and its sad effect felt near Seattle, Washington, just 90 miles south of the Canadian border. Currently, I am as vehemently opposed to illegal immigration as I was then, if not more so, and, especially, to the failure of the enforcement agencies of the federal government to properly and faithfully execute the laws that were specially legislated by Congress to stem the flow of illegal aliens into the United States. You know, having the mind and conscience of a true American constitutes being faithful and true to an American culture and seeking to identify with American ideals, two of which are using the freedoms and liberty available to readily assimilate into the American mainstream, and putting the good of the uniquely sovereign American economy and government above that of any other national interest.
With over 20 million illegal aliens (the majority of whom are Hispanic) within the country, holding jobs with false documentation, or no documentation at all of citizenship, should truly civic-minded natural born, or naturalized, citizens feel rightfully suspicious, and perhaps outraged, when, perhaps, they stand waiting in supermarket check-out lines behind Hispanic individuals unable to speak a bit of English who are attempting to purchase items they can't afford? If, for instance, the average American citizen standing in those lines knew that those people attempting to check-out were, probably, un-apprehended shoplifters, who had deliberately conspired with other shoplifters to surreptitiously enter stores to steal merchandise from unsuspecting storeowners, would she feel any differently about them? Would the average American have the inclination to speak-out against such people? Surprisingly, today, most honest, and perhaps not so honest, natural born and naturalized citizens in this country immediately report shoplifters to storeowners and managers if they see them pilfer merchandise while shopping. Why? Well, shoplifting is clearly against the law, even if the crime is only classified as a misdemeanor. Good citizens are not supposed to break the law. Going a bit further, what if an individual, poor, ragged, and obviously hungry, enters a store and stuffs expensive food items into his pants and furtively attempts to exit the store undetected? What if that person is apprehended by store security personnel, handcuffed, arrested, and, ultimately, turned-over to the police? Will most people feel sorry for the thief and wish him a speedy release from the criminal justice system? No, I don't think so.
Posing another feasible scenario, suppose that a person (let's presume that she's a natural born citizen of the United States) wants to obtain a federal job working inside a federal compound that requires special documentation. Let's also suppose that all this person wants to do is to work honestly for the federal government in order to get a much higher salary, but has no credentials to get inside the federal compound. To get the proper credentials, she would have to abide by the existing laws and go through an administrative process that would require a considerable length of time, and even then there would be no absolute guarantee of her getting the credentials. So, she secretly pays a forger five-hundred dollars for a false, but very convincing, credential and, thereby, gains entrance to, and work in, the federal compound. If this person is subsequently discovered to have a forged credential and is arrested by federal law enforcement agents, will most people consider it a miscarriage of justice if she is convicted of a federal crime and imprisoned? No, I don't think so. She broke the law.
Currently assembled on the streets and highways of most American cities, especially, in places like Prince William County, Virginia, are congregations of undocumented aliens, Hispanic men and women, people who can't speak a coherent sentence in proper English, waiting for contractors and businesspeople to offer them daily work for under-the-table wages. Tragic but true, most of these Hispanic men, who can't speak any English, have committed the crimes of conspiracy to illegally enter the United States as well as the crime of illegally entering the United States. These people, mostly Mexican, have violated U.S. federal law to illicitly celebrate the outrageous exhortation Felipe Calderon, the current President of Mexico, gave to illegal Mexican aliens, that, "Where there is a Mexican, there is Mexico," which actually encouraged an increase of illegal immigration into the United States.
With the steady increase in the population of Hispanic citizenry throughout the nation, there is going to be a large continuing component of that population who will seek the interests of Mexico, and other nations South of the U.S. border, over the interests of the United States. For instance, a pregnant woman in Juarez, Mexico conspires with several other Mexican nationals to illegally immigrate across the U.S. border into El Paso, Texas. They pay a sinister person, called a coyote, to smuggle them across the border in a truck, car, or van. The pregnant woman is in her ninth month of pregnancy and gets caught by the U.S. Border Patrol, along with her co-conspirators and the coyote, immediately after entering the United States. As she exits the vehicle, her water breaks and she delivers twin boys who, according to existing federal law, are immediately American citizens only because they are born on U.S. soil. The second birth is, however, medically complicated by the woman's life-endangering health problems, so a life-flight helicopter is summoned to take the woman to the nearest hospital, public or private, for the best possible care. Who picks up the tab for these exorbitant hospital expenses? Why, the U.S. taxpayers pays the exorbitant costs of healthcare for all captured illegal aliens who have conspired to violate federal law, and are culpable of federal misdemeanors and felonies. These obvious felons receive top-notch health care, at the expense of the U.S. Government, while 40 million law-abiding American citizens cannot afford to go to a physician to get relief from pain, and, therefore, go without such care.
But that really isn't the full extent of the problem. You see, the children of this illegal alien female now have rights as American citizens, and the woman realizes this. In fact, she fully realized it before she conspired to illegally immigrate. To allege that she didn't is an incredulous stretch of the imagination. She has probably also realized the fact that many U.S. immigration judges (quite a few Hispanic), who are sympathetic to illegal aliens, will routinely rule to allow women, such as her, to possess green cards in order to remain with their citizen children in the United States. Yet, when these children grow to adulthood in the United States, the odds are that they will advocate and encourage other Mexican nationals to do the same as their mother did. Shockingly, approximately 9-to-15 percent of the existing Mexican-American population are those individuals who were born, on U.S. soil, to parents who were illegal aliens at the time of birth. For this primary reason, the existing law should be quickly changed to read that, "only children born to women who are "legally" in the United States at the time of birth are to be classified as natural born citizens." This change would effectively solve the conspiracy issue if illegal alien Mexicans, and any other illegal foreign nationals, realized that they would be immediately deported back to their countries of origin, with their newborn children, if they gave birth in the United States. While many of the Hispanic minority segment, of the U.S. electorate, would probably oppose such a change in the law, the great majority of U.S. citizens who seek the greatest good for the benefit of the American republic would favor such a change.
The bottom line of the illegal immigration issue is that illegal aliens are criminals, because they have broken federal law to get what they want. Currently, the first act of illegally immigrating into the United States constitutes a misdemeanor, what running a stoplight is equivalent to in Texas. Placing illegal immigration, a conspiratorial crime, on the same criminal level as shoplifting (a low misdemeanor under federal and most state law) does not make good sense. There are no teeth in such laws in order to deter other people from violating them. With the current level of fear from potential terrorism in the U.S., the probability of a terrorist, posing as an illegal Hispanic alien, crossing the Southern U.S. border into the U.S. in order to commit mayhem somewhere in the nation, is pretty great. This is why the crime of illegal immigration should carry with it the punishment afforded to a felony, not a misdemeanor. The primary reason that there is not more espionage and sabotage committed in the United States, by agents of foreign nations and U.S. citizens working for them, is that there are such horrible penalties for such felony crimes. A second act of illegal immigration, by an alien who was simply returned to the border after being apprehended the first time, is, supposedly, a federal felony; but the Border Patrol working in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California hardly ever enforce the law to its fullest extent. I know this to be a fact, as I worked as a San Diego County Deputy Sheriff, for several months, closely around senior U.S. Border Patrol agents who clearly explained to me how they were ordered by Washington to use restraint in enforcing immigration laws.
When you see Hispanic men or women, who can't speak a lick of English, in grocery stores, 7-Elevens, Laundromats, Walmarts, or loitering on the streets waiting for work, the odds are that they are illegal aliens. You see, legal foreign residents, who have immigrated properly into the United States will, at least, attempt to learn English, and will have a working English vocabulary within six months-to-a year of arriving in the country. Most, if not all, legal immigrants are literate in their own native language, know a smattering of spoken English, and will purchase instructional English language materials to improve their written and spoken proficiency in pursuit of eventual naturalization. On the other hand, illegal aliens will, in most cases, refrain from exposing themselves in adult literacy classes, and will only associate with other illegal aliens in safe houses provided by rogue citizens who illicitly harbor illegal immigrants. Therefore, most undocumented aliens won't attempt to learn English while they are attempting to establish themselves in their false identities, which might take as long as two years. During that time, they will purchase fraudulent birth certificates, Social Security cards, and other documents, with which they will attempt to obtain drivers' licenses for the purpose of having false state-approved identification in their possession. This is another crime, a felony, added to their long list of offenses. Though law enforcement is cracking down on the providers of these fake documents, they are still quite prevalent in large urban areas where large Hispanic communities exist.
The crux of the current illegal immigration problem in the United States is two-fold. The first, and most compelling issue that must be addressed is the lack of proper immigration law enforcement provided by U.S. law enforcement agencies. The second compelling issue is the lack of a strong deterrent against illegal immigration, and is fully contingent on solving the problems associated with the first issue. The immediate construction of a penetration-proof wall or barrier along the Southern U.S. border, which would effectively stem the flow of undocumented Hispanic aliens, would, of course, be a good start, and most of the American electorate would appreciate it being done. If the federal government can quickly build, at taxpayer expense electrified fences and impenetrable walls around such military facilities as Area 51, nuclear power plants, and other top-secret federal facilities, in order to keep ordinary American citizens out, why can't they do the same thing along the borders of the United States to keep out illegal aliens? The reason that it has not been done is basically political. You have a U.S. Congress that supposedly creates laws, telling an extremely duped electorate that the legislations are essential and proper, while, at the same time, secretly auctioning-off the selective purposes of the laws for the benefit of special political interests with hidden agendas.
Then there is the Executive Branch, the U.S. President, who swears on the Bible to faithfully execute, or enforce, the laws of the American republic, while, at the same time, clandestinely planning his own re-election through enforcing only the laws that will be advantageous to his own political future. While both Congress and the President, and, most likely, the U.S. Supreme Court, would publicly agree that a conspiring recidivist shoplifter, in DC or any state, should be charged with a felony, convicted, and shipped off to a penal institution for a long, long penal sentence, they can't seem to get together to concur that an illegal alien is a criminal, and should be treated like one. If these two issues are not properly addressed before the end of 2010, there will be many more undocumented Hispanic aliens within the U.S. borders, than the current 15 to 20 million, with whom to deal; and at that time a point of no return may be reached, in terms of crime and social disorder, which will be to the extreme detriment of law-abiding American citizens.
Norton R. Nowlin took M.A. and B.A. degrees in the social and behavioral sciences from the University of Texas at Tyler, studied law for one full year at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, in San Diego, California, and earned an ABA-approved advanced paralegal certification from Edmonds Community College, in Lynnwood, Washington. Mr. Nowlin has attended LaJolla, California's National University and Malibu's Pepperdine University to attain graduate credits in business management and economics. Mr. Nowlin also attained a Texas State Teaching Certification, in social studies and psychology, from the University of Texas at Tyler. A paralegal, published essayist, poet, and free-lance fiction writer, Mr. Nowlin resides in Northern Virginia with his wife, the renown math tutor, Diane C. Nowlin, and their two very intelligent cats.
Article Source: ezinearticles.com
|
